Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon

By Andrew Walker BBC News

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.

The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.

Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.

And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.

In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.

US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, also fell into American hands.

Crimes

Shortly afterwards Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research.

"If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."

Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Braun and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American research and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union."

Arthur Rudolph: "100% Nazi"

Events moved rapidly. President Truman authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans reached America.

There was, though, one major problem. Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism militarism" would be excluded.

Under this criterion even von Braun himself, the man who masterminded the Moon shots, would have been ineligible to serve the US. A member of numerous Nazi organisations, he also held rank in the SS. His initial intelligence file described him as "a security risk".

And von Braun's associates included:

Arthur Rudolph, chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".

Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated: "He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."

Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the process.

All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.

And the paperclip which secured their new details in their personnel files gave the whole operation its name. Sixty years on, the legacy of Paperclip remains as vital as ever.

With its radar-absorbing carbon impregnated plywood skin and swept-back single wing, the 1944 Horten Ho 229 was arguably the first stealth aircraft.

The Stealth bomber: Based on a 1944 German design

The US military made one available to Northrop Aviation, the company which would produce the $2bn B-2 Stealth bomber - to all intents and purposes a modern clone of the Horten - a generation later.

Cruise missiles are still based on the design of the V-1 missile and the scramjets powering Nasa's state-of-the-art X-43 hypersonic aircraft owe much to German jet pioneers.

Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.

Cook says that such technology "could be so destructive that it would endanger world peace and the US decided to keep it secret for a long time".

But, while celebrating the undoubted success of Project Paperclip, many will prefer to remember the thousands who died to send mankind into space.

2 Comments:

Does anyone have a copy, that they can post or email me, of the 178 page Senate Hearing that took place in the 1970's, on the CIA's 1950's testing of LSD and Methadrine. The tests were done on unaware soldiers, and done until the soldiers died to see the effects, and doses. I believe that the tests were not, as they said, for truth serum for communists, but to test what doses drug dealers could sell to the U.S. public, to make them compliant and harmless against the corrupt government, that was beginning to conquer the world. Judy

Regarding that the tests had to do with laying the groundwork for distribution throughout the United States, I would suggest that if their intentions were bad, then they had no idea what was coming. There is something that happens to many people under the influence of lysergic and this is a truly expanded consciousness, if temporary. Obviously, some do not experience this, reacting violently as they try to shove the experience, a vascillating peg, into a fixed hole. It won't work.

This is what makes me wonder if the LSD culture we all know of wasn't the product of a renegade, arguably misguided, element of the intelligence community.

Today, methamphetamines are the preferred approach. Their effect is not nearly as far reaching but it is more predictable, locking a person into a pattern of contemplating the mundane and minutia. It is not a big picture experience and this is why it is preferred. It serves to compartmentalize experience. Acid is for decompartmentalizing but it is extremely potent and carries with it a heavy karma. If you dose the wrong person, you won't ever be able to forget it.

If an element of the American intelligence community, with bad intentions, sought to distribute LSD in America en masse, they were seriously deluded, something I fully entertain.

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About Me

Short version: I'm not sure how much more eclectic a person can be but I am sure that a lot of individuals consider themselves to be more unique than most - a definite contradiction of course. I was born on the first day of the summer of love and I have been an activist, a geek, a hippie, a bit of a punk, a nomad, a sailor, and a bunch of stuff all in between. I have been a pagan, a buddhist, a zoroastrian, an atheist, blah blah. Labels aside, scanning my posts are a better guage of my interests than any paragraph I can write. Yet I am so much more. Aren't you? LONG VERSION